22 con victions were a little unsettled and vague. She thought that something ought to be done about the menace of Socialism and Communism, and she was rather sympathetic toward pro- hibition. Her ideas didn't go much further than that, but the practical side of the game fascinated her, and she was quick to learn the tricks. The first thing to do was to get an organ- ization. The women voters were still the stepdaughters of the party, an unor- ganized and an unknown quantity. Mrs. Sabin, in January, 1921, form- ed the Women's National Republican Club and became its first president. Year after year, she was reëlected until, in 1926, she refused another term. No one will challenge the statement that she put over the club. Here her vigor and talent for direct action revealed themselves. When she deter- mined that the club should have quar- ters of its own, she took an option on the property at 8 East Thirty-seventh Street and then went into Wall Street personally and sold the bonds to fin- ance the enterprise. Later she super- vised the decoration of the interior; the furnishings are entirely Early American. B y 1 928, Mrs. Sabin was a big shot in Republican politics. She op- posed Hoover in the convention, but after the nomination had been obtained the Hoover m an age rs made her director of the women's cam- paign in the East. Other ideas, however, were stirring in her head. She had long since lost sympathy for prohibition; she was convinced now that it had killed temperance, that it was the ma j or issue, ; i =:-:',::,::: of the day. Once . Hoover was in the White House, and had made his disil- lusioning inaugural speech, she took the long dive and formed her non-partisan wom- en's organization to fight the drys with their own weapons. The new venture was particularly ex- citing because it called upon her to do things she had never done before. There was public speaking; Mrs. Sabin hated public speaking. The magazines wanted her to write articles; Mrs. Sabin had never done any writing and was acutely con- scious of some of her scholastic limi- tations, but she kept at it and eventually delivered her articles. Public speaking was simply a matter of courage, for she soon discovered that she had a gift for thinking on her feet. She has a feeling for a neat, pithy phrase and her aptitude for repartee has become so strongly developed that she actually en- joys being heckled. Thus, she was not disturbed when editors and national leaders refused at first to take her reform movement seri- ously; she had expected that. At an early conference of the organization in Chicago, the newspapers referred pointedly to the fact that virtually all of her colleagues were rich women, and one magazine spoke happily of her group as "more charming than churchy." Will Rogers, too, shot a homespun arrow at her, suggesting that "the trouble with repeal is that the 1 f . " wrong peop e are or It. The dry greeting to the birth of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform combined ridicule and bitterness and dealt with it as a ;\. ijf î. ':': ;... - -:::. -:.: '" , , , , , : . . ' ""\ --:' 1/ '.' ! >1 r>p' \ ^ "", >""-",,,? N:' $-" "'\:' ' 'i:- ;, ':\ " . .. ....:...;. ...... ", - . '. .,' . . ." -.-.... .' q = >,.< . ,ø.di".,' OCTOBER 2.2., I 32 fad of society butterflies. The members, one of the dry leaders said, "are wom- en whose names a clever adver- tIser of soap, toothpaste, or bed springs would like to have attached to his ad- vertisements." Later, Dr. D. Leigh Col vin, with less kindliness, referred to them as "Bacchantian maidens parched for wine." Mrs. Sabin demanded an apology for that, but she was secretly delighted; there is nothing she loves so well as a fight. She was, however, a little touched when one morning she received in the mail a letter from an aged and saintly churchwoman in the Midwest. "Every night," the letter conclud- ed, after a denunciation of the cam- paign for repeal, "I get down on my knees and pray to God to damn your I " sou. One year of activity convinced the public that Mrs. Sabin's organization was neither a creation of the devil nor the whimsy of a society woman. One hundred thousand members were enrolled during that time. The W.C.T.V. had started among the simpler folk and struggled to work up the social scale; the wet association t" --- "Tl., Uf', :-- r' : .,., ' \ :. ) .'. __ '-io.. . ..,,?b,,' '.. '..0" ;f "" '''' ..... .':-:':'. 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'",-' "I'm quit tin', Mr. Schultz. I'm sorry I learned the business."